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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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I've always been so curious what it's like for aphantasic people to read fiction. If you don't see everything playing out in your head like a movie, how do you follow along with the story? How do you remember what happened a paragraph ago if you can't see it?
I also wonder about this same thing with people who have no inner monologue. Do they not hear the books that their eyeballs are reading to them? Do the words just go into some dark void and become a silent kind of "knowing." How does that work? I don't understand.
I mean, I just know the story because I've just read it. It's hard to describe. I don't see color in my head but I know what the color red is, same thing with shades. Possibly more relatable is smell/taste - most people can't recreate smell or taste in their head but they innately know what a smell or taste is after some exposure to it.
Interesting. I think I know what you mean about taste and smell. BUT for me, just like when I see something or read something traumatizing and keep randomly seeing the images over and over in a fairly obtrusive way, if I smell something absolutely awful, I will get sort of "smell flashbacks" for a few days or even weeks.
The worst one that ever happened was when I was a massage therapist, working on an old man. He had these blackheads on his back the size of pencil erasers and when I put any pressure on his skin they would poop themselves out and the further out they came the worse they smelled, like rotting pork, but mixed with poorly cleaned dentures. I drove myself crazy cleaning my equipment, studio and self because I kept smelling it no matter what I did for weeks. I started carrying a bottle of lavender essential oil to sniff when it got bad.
Since then I tell all my male friends to start getting back facials by the time they're 40 and keep doing it at least annually until they die.
The only stuff that's obtrusive for me is sounds, and even then it's usually only sounds that have rhythm. For the most part once I am no longer actively observing something and shift my attention elsewhere it stops existing for me. It makes forming attachments hard to say the least.
Opposite for me - I don't understand how people have sounds and pictures inside their heads.